In a sane world, this ought to be all the evidence you'd need to conclude that the drug war is just a complete unmitigated disaster:
So all we've ever accomplished here is getting a bunch of people killed for nothing? Yeah, that about sums it up. The question then is how much longer we'll continue causing constant and horrific violence while pretending to do the precise opposite.
Researchers at the Urban Health Research Initiative (UHRI), a program of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CfE), conducted a systematic review of all available English-language scientific literature to examine the impacts of drug-law enforcement on drug-market violence.
The systematic review identified 15 international studies examining the impact of drug-law enforcement on violence. Contrary to the prevailing belief that drug-law enforcement reduces violence, 87% of the studies (13 studies) observed that drug law enforcement was associated with increasing levels of drug-market violence. [MarketWire]
So all we've ever accomplished here is getting a bunch of people killed for nothing? Yeah, that about sums it up. The question then is how much longer we'll continue causing constant and horrific violence while pretending to do the precise opposite.
Permission to Reprint: This content is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution license. Content of a purely educational nature in Drug War Chronicle appear courtesy of DRCNet Foundation, unless otherwise noted.
Add new comment